He begins life without beauty or good fortune, a fact made plain because his right leg is an inch shorter than his left one. The doctors tell his mother that this is a rare, even random, genetic mutation, like having two different-colored eyes or a port-wine stain. But his mother knows better. She swaddles him, coos at him, brushes his ink-black hair, and whispers, “Life is cruel, Robert.” Once he is old enough to understand, he doesn’t want to believe her.
His mother doesn’t press the lesson. When Robert turns four, she buys him reprieve in the form of special shoes, the uppers crafted from genuine leather, the right one having an elevated heel. Since these shoes are expensive for her, a seamstress without a husband, he has only one pair, and each time he outgrows them, his mother gives him another pair handmade by the shoemaker who lives two apartments below their own. In the beginning, he admires his reflection in storefront windows: two identical legs, his anomaly normed, his form closer to an ideal. Robert believes that he’s been evened out, made whole in a way that almost everyone on earth takes for granted. But as he grows older, he hears people muttering as he walks by, and their words cling to him. Odd, defective, sad, strange. Cripple. Freak.
